Wednesday, 12 September 2012

This is not only the perennial problem of team-building but
also that of government: creating esprit de corps or forming a body politic. It is also a problem that Alistair Cook will face regarding his
best batsman now that Andrew Strauss has resigned the captaincy, citing a gut
feeling that his “race was run,” his depleted resilience undoubtedly
exacerbated by the Kevin Pietersen saga – which is not the same as claiming the
latter was the sole cause of his
captain’s exhaustion (and thus there’s no cause to be sceptical about the
outgoing skipper’s stated reasons: unlike Iggy Pop, he didn’t want to be a passenger). For it is true, in both a trivial and a profound way, that the events befalling our lives always
emerge from multiple causes bumping into each other...

Sometimes, as both Strauss and KP would confirm, these life-events
are great headline-making ruptures and schisms; sometimes, an accumulation of tiny
cracks and fissures that remain imperceptible in the large-scale day-to-day
concerns of a life (until such time as they subsume it, if steps are not taken
to forestall that occurrence), even if the decision to absent oneself from
office is a single clean break on the ‘main line’. Cutting the cord rather than
coming apart at the seams. And so it is that a fatigued Strauss, a threshold of
lowered resistance crossed, no longer ableto tolerate what he’d put up with
only the previous week, has gone – and to universal acclaim – while the KP
issue, and the concomitant problem of unity, lingers.

As is well known, when Team England and the ECB decided to
omit Pietersen from the Lord’s
Test against South Africa, even with the world number one Test ranking at
stake, the behavioural code that Hugh Morris deemed him to have flouted through
his shenanigans in Leeds
the week before was a breach of the team’s “unity of purpose and action”. By taking
such drastic measures against their star batsman, Andy Flower and the England management
eschewed pragmatism for principle and, in so doing, ostensibly protected (or restored) the harmony of the dressing room
and asserted the
primacy of team spirit over all else during a time in which it appeared to
have evaporated – if, indeed, it can be said ever to have truly existed at all…

For, above the noisy hullabaloo surrounding Pietersen this
last month, that old aphorism of the ex-Spurs and Barcelona striker, Steve Archibald, has fluttered
across the airwaves on a high frequency, beyond the audible range of some yet
loud and piercing to others. “Team spirit is an illusion glimpsed in the
aftermath of victory”. Cue slightly cynical titter and sage nods of heads, then
move on to the next universal truism.

But is team spirit really just an illusion? And are those
surfing the insistent and palpable highs and lows of team sport suffering some
sort of collective hallucination? Was the MCG ‘sprinkler dance’ the addled reverie
of poor delusional souls? Or could it be that the adage actually reveals more
about Steve Archibald’s sense of detachment from the group than the nature of
the latter itself? Or even, perhaps, could it be an oblique expression of the
general cynicism and individualism of an age in which “rational self-interest”,
the cornerstone of neoconservatism, has apparently been sanctified?

ebbs and flows (and
sprinklers)

Superficially, of course, it would appear hard to disagree
with Archibald. Team spirit does indeed feel at its strongest in the aftermath
of victory: euphoria irrupts; a group buzzes; camaraderie is felt coursing
through the collective body, an intangible yet conspicuous sensation that almost
anyone who has played (voluntarily, rather than at school!) would have experienced
at one time or other. Even so, it stands to reason that a group whose very existence and purpose is to participate in
competitive sport will have its mood largely dictated by the result. Also,
that an accumulation of victories will give this feeling more permanence still.
This is not Harvard PhD stuff. But does that mean that the mood, the spirit, is
wholly determined by the result?

The Archibald Hypothesis, if that is not too grandiose a
description, appears to rest on a particular version of what philosophers would
call ontological fallacy (that is, an
error as to what type of entity something is, its nature), assuming that team
spirit is like an object: something definitively attained or definitively lost;
here today, gone tomorrow; now you have it, now you don’t.

A palpable, ineffable and fluctuating sensation within the collective body, team spirit is
perhaps better thought of as what another pair of Scottish philosopher (of
considerably greater influence than Archibald), Duns Scotus and later David
Hume, called a “haecceity”:
a “thisness” with the characteristics of an “individual”. Take the atmosphere
in a room: demonstrably there, even if you cannot quite put your finger on its
provenance or precisely gauge its
lifespan. The same for the seasons: even if the precise moment of its arrival
or passing are beyond accurate knowledge, we get enough of a sensation summer’s
haecceity to know it is around (well,
bad example…). Same for team spirit.

Like everything else in the universe, then, a cricket team
(and thus its spirit) is a dynamical system. It has a discernible emergence
(even if haphazard and chaotic, with those multiple causes), a distinct means
of holding together (‘consistency’), and an ultimate coming-undone, a
disintegration. Birth, life, death – everything from an entire species to its individual
members, a continent to a thought. The Canadian thinker Brian Massumi
summarises precisely what any structure – Team England included – comprises:

“A structure is defined by what escapes it. Without
exception, it emerges from chance, lives with and by a margin of deviation, and
ends in disorder. A structure is defined by its thresholds – the
relative limits within which it selects, perceives, and captures more or less
consistently (its margin of deviation); and the absolute limits beyond which it
breaks down (chance, chaos). Order is the approximate, and always temporary,
prevention of disorder.”

So, stability is only ever metastability: order within certain limits. And much as water
freezes below a certain temperature and turns to steam above another threshold,
a group’s staying-the-same only happens between certain limits – what a group
leadership might call drawing the line –
and with a certain expenditure of energy. Staying the same requires energy. It
is negentropic. There are no closed
systems. The outside seeps in, the inside trickles out. As the French philosophers
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (whose A Thousand Plateauswas translated
by Massumi) wrote in a broadly political context: “there is no society that
does not leak in all directions”.

Given the ebbs and flows of team spirit, it is little wonder,
then, that the bonds within a group or team are sometimes referred to as
“chemistry”. And this is only partly
metaphorical, for in a very real sense that is precisely what leadership or
management works upon: human beings’ moods, for each of which there is a
corresponding admixture of hormones, a sub-personal neurochemical stratum to be
stabilized. Not so much micromanagement,
as molecular. Flower the chemist, rather than the alchemist?

no such thing as a closed system: tunnel at Rafah, Palestine

porousness, leakage

“Capturing energies that escape” is as probably as good a
description as you’ll find of what team management is about. From this point of
view, rule by fear and heavy-handed subjugation – and the concomitant attempt
to seal off those creative ruptures, inventions and ‘escapes’ of the
imagination that threaten to transform the identity of the group, to set it off
on an adventure, a becoming-other – is
less efficient than through empathy and consensus, since, with tyranny, there’s
always more escaping energy to capture (for Deleuze and Guattari, every organ
in the Imperial social body is “a possible protest”), something that all
paranoid despots learn in the end.

Undoubtedly, Pietersen’s summer-long brinkmanship vis-à-vis
his commitment to Team England’s cause over and against his apparent desire to
maximise his IPL earnings lent credence to the view that he was jeopardising
team “unity and purpose of action”, and even that he had been marginalised as a
result of his behaviour: “it’s not easy being me in the England dressing room”
he complained, infamously. Then came those text messages – no, those,
you doos – grousing about his
treatment at the hands of the Axis of Andy (an act easily interpreted from a
psychological standpoint as unconsciously punishing his ‘persecutors’ by
seeking to undermine the unity they have created) and at the time
disingenuously spun as offering tips on how to dismiss Strauss out (“Can’t wait
till you come round the wicket”). Finally, there was his extraordinary video,
morsels of sincerity piercing the PR blancmange in a curious mix of contrition
and self-justification, all attempting to position himself back within the
group.

It goes without saying that a group of whatever dimension is
beset by factors that undermine it from within (what the anthropologists like
to call ‘scission’) and without. For cricket teams, there are not only the
ravages of defeats, but injury, ageing and renewal cycles, salary jealousies
and haggling over bonuses, selectorial issues, availability, personal rivalries,
the purring and pettiness of the Ego, as well as events that blow in from the
horizon potentially destabilizing the team (Mark Boucher’s appalling,
career-ending eye injury could have had this effect on South Africa. In
addition, there are unflattering or critical passages from current
teammates’ autobiographies, which don’t appear to undermine the “unity of
purpose and trust” within Team England
as much as text messages. What was it Marshall McCluhan
said about the medium being the message? Anyway, in the light of Massumi’s
description of structuration processes cited above, these factors are some of the
individual’s “margins of deviation” (the group here as an entity distinct from
its component parts is an “individual”, a haecceity).

The underlying reason for such continual disequilibrium is
simple: the desire to do as you please, the appeal of an unmediated life, is
very strong indeed, much stronger than rules. Since the dawn of time, then, socialization
can be understood as finding the means to bind the errant desires of its
members to the codes, norms, or laws by which that society lives (always with
struggle, always with leakage, always with molecular change). An ‘Us’ must be
created, a sense of belonging, an embodiment
of the group: a social body.* And a cricket team is no different.

Anyway, what is constant in all this is that, while a team
spirit can be artificially induced – as paintballing is for the village side,
so a visit to Gallipoli was for Steve Waugh’s Australians, and there are people
who trade on this supposedly ‘scientific’ ability – its organic emergence, its crossing of a threshold, is only truly
intelligible retrospectively (a haecceity: both unambiguously present and vague
of provenance). And since this spirit is always already in the process of
coming undone, it needs perpetual shoring up.

In a modern international team, the myriad distractions with
sponsors and endorsements, untimely nights out on pedalos, persistent screaming
at misfields, Twitter (with its potential breach of the sanctity of the
dressing room) – all these are potentially ruinous to team spirit, all part of
the vicissitudes of that intangible togetherness. Little wonder that, speaking
earlier this year about the possible end of Chris Gayle’s exile from the West Indies team, Nasser Hussain – something of a lay
expert in creating harmony from disparate elements – argued: “It doesn’t matter
so much what he does at training or even on the pitch. It’s in the hotel bar at
11 o’clock that counts, with young impressionable players hanging on his every
word…” Leakage.

But the means of creating order – and the sense of belonging
and team spirit that will grow gradually from that soil – is not only top-down,
implanted through managerial edict. There are also bottom-up mechanisms, thousands
of tiny gestures and ‘local’ interactions (at times, so subtle and nuanced that
the team doesn’t perceive them and which have already landed their blows on the
spirit of the team before the team knows what has happened) that, like street-level
social niceties, add up to the character of a community. Ultimately, that is
what ‘banter’ is: a form of self-regulation within a group, clipping people’s
wings, cauterizing overinflated egos, the wayward member either modifying his
behaviour or risking ostracism. Part autopoietic,
self-organizing system; part command structure.

Yet by the same token, banter
itself must be conducive to harmony, since it too can disrupt the
equilibrium – as, for instance, when it becomes bullying, the systematic harassment
of a marginal figure (often unconsciously pursued, ironically, as a means of
strengthening collective bonds, or at least those of a sub-group within a
group). And in the process of becoming-ostracised – apparently the topic of
Pietersen and Matt Prior’s heart-to-heart conversation in the lead up to the
Lord’s game, after which the former said he was feeling “great” – this
perception can induce the worst paranoia, wild accusations and violent lashing
out as one struggles over one’s status (the serenity of one’s Ego).

This, of course, is the obvious explanation for the excesses
of Pietersen’s behaviour – his perception, recently
underlined, that someone in the England dressing room was
unambiguously lampooning him from behind the cover of a parody Twitter account:
KPGenius. More specifically, his grievance that what went on inside the
dressing room was in some sense being
leaked beyond its confines, turning a private sanctuary into a public
goldfish bowl and completely transforming the nature of the ‘banter’, affecting
the relations between the individual players and thus the team as organism.

Ilya Prigogine

KP, phase transitions,
metastability

To return to a paraphrase of the initial question: How do
you turn a heterogeneous molecular population (the organs) into ‘molar’ unity
(the organism)?

Just as the team is an always open reality, a continual
process of binding energies together, so its spirit is not static, but something
that fluctuates. Nothing is ever fatal or irreversible (it was Prior who
instigated the clear-the-air conversation), even though the continual effort to
make the multiple One, to build a team, undergoes these often imperceptible molecular
leakages and escapes – the criticisms, the selfishness, the arguments, the
glances – that are felt as a perturbation
in the ‘molar’ circuits, a disruption of (metastable) order, a dissipation,
leading to paranoiac accusations and heavy-handed wing-clipping alike.

Deriving as it does from physics, Deleuze and Guattari’s
concept of molarity – turning the
parts (which never cease being parts that subsist) into a whole, the same body of matter considered as
two regimes – is one that nevertheless perfectly captures the abstract dynamics
of social processes: i.e. turning a loose agglomeration of bodies into a unity,
giving it an identity. Perhaps, finally, it is by drawing out the earlier parallelisms
between socialization and nonlinear thermodynamics that we will best grasp the
misconceptions around the notion of team spirit, and, by dint of that, the misunderstanding
regarding the allegedly heinous or terminal nature of KP’s peccadilloes.

One of the prime figures in nonlinear thermodynamics, Ilya Prigogine,
demonstrated – particularly in his book Order
out of Chaos: Man’s New Discourse with Nature, co-authored with Isabelle
Stengers – that physical systems, under the influence of “attractors” (like
poles), tend to self-organize toward an optimal distribution of energy. But – and this is the crucial lesson for team cultures –he
also showed that, pace classical thermodynamics, not only are all
structures open, to the extent they are linked to an energy source or
involve the infolding of the aleatory outside (our bodies need light and water; our
societies need food, electricity), some complex systems are “dissipative” (i.e.
far from equilibrium) and thus there are
several metastable states that a system can attain. In sum, he repudiated linear
determinism and simple cause and effect – for instance, sneeringly telling your teammates
that they weren’t capable of dominating the world’s best bowling attack
necessarily spelling the end of your involvement with the group…

Schematically, and bearing in mind the author’s resolutely
non-expert understanding of these matters, we note that water in a pot under the
influence of heat (i.e. an intensive difference between outside and inside
temperature) leads to different patterns of molecular activity, activity that
may look chaotic but about which mathematical modelling reveals strict patterns,
or order (“unity of purpose and action”). At a low temperature on the stove,
the difference in temperature evens out through a simple, uniform dispersion of
heat: conduction. If the temperature
is increased, bubbles of hot water break free from colder water and accelerate
upwards towards the surface of the water before turning back in a circular
motion: convection. Finally, if the
temperature is increased further, a system of nested vortexes and eddies – turbulence – increasingly usurps the
order of circulating water. Two things: (1) the capacity to ‘fall into’ these
three patterns of motion is immanent to
the fluid medium, a potential, the crucial thing being the thresholds at which the medium switches
from one pattern to another, its “bifurcations”; (2) this matter-energy system self-organizes
into an orderly form through local interactions that are ‘ignorant’ of the global system (the molar individual).

If we persist with the analogy, a metastable state for a
cricket team can be attained (for a short time at least) with a high level of
molecular activity – that is, with ‘creative tensions’ between its constituent
parts – or it may be at a very low-intensity (all players of similar background
and disposition: a public school sixth form team, say) with many hypothetical states
in-between. In order to assess the nature of team spirit (as a metastable
state), what needs to be elucidated is the system’s precise history, its bifurcations
points or “phase transitions”: a different form of motion immanent to the molar
individual’s interrelation of molecular bodies, but not in any way determining,
since these virtual states need to be actualized by another force: always
multiple causes (an event is an encounter); no such thing as a closed system…

In this light, Pietersen’s behaviour at Leeds
– a phase transition in the team dynamic – did not emerge out of the blue but
had as a genealogy a slow, singular labour of causes and their interactions –
both truths and perceptions, each of which is as potentially causally
efficacious as the other. It was no doubt partly to do with having his head
turned by IPL lucre and the moneys received by his globetrotting peers, as Andy
Flower acknowledged. It was also, partly, about his difficulty in
integrating with the team culture and entering the general mateyness of Swann,
Bresnan, Anderson, Cook, Finn, Broad, Prior. As many commentaries have touched
upon, this friction is far from fatal or unique in the history of cricket. As
was said of Boycott: I don’t care for him but I like his runs.

Likewise, the departure of Strauss potentially marks a new bifurcation of the previously dissipative system; a possible search for a new equilibrium. Where there’s a will… Apology and penance is of course a social mechanism that compensates the disrupted equilibrium and can in time restore the harmony and seal the breaches. In the sage words of Andrew Strauss prior to the Lord’s Test: “Cricketers are a pretty forgiving bunch. But we need to bring stuff out in the open, we can’t just have it swept under the carpet and I’ve got no idea at this stage how that’s going to work out… I think if we are going to resolve these issues, everyone’s got to take a bit of a long hard look at how things have developed over the last couple of weeks in particular and say, ‘Have we all done everything we can to avoid this happening?’ …But it’s not going to be resolved overnight. If we’re going to resolve those issues we need to do it face to face, away from the media spotlight and away from PR companies.”

spillage, spirit Such ups and downs in the life of a team provide the most compelling argument against Steve Archibald’s hypothesis. Given that the maxim elides the supposedly illusory team spirit with good team spirit, does this mean that, in the case of a poor result, the corresponding dejection is equally false? Surely the flipside of Archibald’s claim would be that there is never team spirit in defeat, which for many who have been involved in team sports might border on the offensive.

Team spirit is not the same thing as elation. It is always
there: good, bad, or ugly. It is nothing less than the precise resilience of
the bonds permitting a team to dress its wounds and ride out the good and bad
sessions, good and bad days, good and bad weeks. When Strauss asserted prior to
his hundredth and final Test that “you
learn more in defeat than in victory” he was, in a sense, tacitly endorsing
the notion that team spirit encompasses this full spectrum of emotions and that
the exhilaration of victory is merely the highest plateau or pitch of intensity
that it attains.

Most crucially, although it is intangible, it is not
supernatural, not at all transcendent as the word spirit perhaps implies. Far
from being in some netherworld beyond, it is the potential immanent within an
ensemble of bodies to bring forth these intensive states of togetherness in
which concerted action pushes the component individuals to great collective achievements,
that gets something more out of them.

Even if team spirit is not felt in all corners of the
dressing room in quite the same way, to quite the same degree; even if some
people may be part of a team but not fully part of its spirit, that doesn’t
render it some dizzy fantasy of collective togetherness. The mutual care for
those struggling through tough times, looking out for your mates, creating a
supportive environment, singing not only when you’re winning – all of that is
real as a bruise on the inside thigh.

Fragile? Perhaps. Precarious? Certainly. Susceptible to a
sudden collapse? Without doubt. But just because no-one has ever seen or
touched something, that doesn’t make it illusory.

* Simplifying to the extreme,
for a long time this attempt to forge a sense of belonging was mediated by
custom, belief, and meaning. In ‘primitive’, kinship-based
society, it was done through social rituals and marking in bare flesh
(tattoos were more than decoration then) so as to fashion a memory for man of obligation, mediation –
what Nietzsche called a “cruelist mnemotechnics”. In State societies, the sense of belonging was elaborated principally through symbolic representations of
the higher unity (Law, tax money, official language – all substitutes for the
distant despot that no-one saw), but these transcendent Ideas must also be continually hewn into the
social body, whence flags and anthems. In ‘civilized’, market-based society, the unity is achieved through contractual
relations and normative behaviour operates around honouring those contracts –
meaning and belief are entirely secondary.

Wednesday, 5 September 2012

With England
having secured the essentially meaningless number one ODI ranking until they
get annihilated inIndia
in January, the final game of the series was basically played for pride alone:
the wheee of a win as opposed to the meh of a draw. Still, (Confucius, he
say) winning’s a habit and all that…

However, without Flower’s forbidding dressing room presence,
England
were undone by what the experts call ‘sh*t batting’. And there was a
carrot-topped streak of indiscipline running through it.

First, Resilience’s Ian Ronald Belly-Lad, having prevented
the ball from hitting the stumps by stopping it with one of his pads, a mode of
dismissal known to the selfsame experts as ‘leg before wicket’ (or lbw), decided
to spunk the sole review of the innings
in the fourth over (the very fact that he had to discuss it at all ought to
have told him to shuffle off for a dose of medicine…but then, he has a history of not
wanting to go when dismissed on this ground). This was cricket’s equivalent
of putting all your cash on the roulette wheel (red, obviously) on the first
night of a once-in-a-lifetime’s-savings-funded fortnight in Vegas.

Then, after the awful inevitability of Ravi’s failure (see
below), Body Language’s Jonny Bairstow played a cameo from off of the balls of
his feet, bopping hither and thither to prod down the hot tin roof of a pitch,
‘taking it’ to Big Morkel with aggressive intent, before unnecessarily walking across his stumps and chipping one to deep
square leg. Red Bull at a gate. After that, Eion Morgan skipped down the pitch
to JP Duminy’s nondescript, _____ offies and got too close to the ball,
slapping it flat to mid on.

There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a young (and
undoubtedly high) Ozzy Osbourne earning a living in Berlin in the 1970s by
being on call for an eccentric German aristocrat (if that is not itself
tautological) whose highly particular fetish involved lying beneath a glass
coffee table while someone (Ozzy, in this instance) perched above it and… – well,
there’s not a sufficiently delicate way to put it – defecated atop the hitherto transparent surface. Whatever turns you
on, I guess.

For any workshy young deviant, one for whom the last
vestiges of ‘self-esteem’ have long since flown the roost, that is truly a gig
to inspire envy. Getting paid for dumping – unbelievable, Jeff! (Mind you, I’m
not entirely sure one could get away with listing it as a legitimate ‘job goal’
when signing a Jobseeker’s Agreement.)

Anyway, I mention Ozzy only to illustrate the fact that the
modern world is full of cushty sinecures and chancers blagging it in easy billets,
all of which brings us to Ravi Bopara, continually selected as a batsman for an
international cricket team and yet not required to make any actual runs. Nice
work if you can get it!

“But he brings a lot to the party,” his apologists counter.
Fine, but his bag of cheap Es and wraps of meow-meow are no use if you don’t
fancy the adult confectionary.

narks

It’s the Big (well, Medium-Sized) Debate: are ODIs just a
sugar rush (and not quite as good a sugar rush as the new stuff) providing
little in the way of nourishment? Maybe. Either way, we all know “sugar’s
rubbish”. But the ECB tried to persuade us that a five-match Australia
series shoehorned into the middle of the summer was a worthy sporting attraction,
that those bright yellow jerseys would compete with the other prominent bright
yellow jerseys of the summer’s sports stories – the ones that started out
clean, with the everyman brilliance of Bradley Wiggins, and yet ended sullied,
with the news that seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong was to be
banned for steroids, WADA completely ignoring the fact that he has beaten
cancer and thus had immunity from everything… Yet this hasn’t been the only
sporting drugs story of late. Oh no.

Many felt that the ECB were clutching at straws when they
accused the Saffers of being drugs cheats. Sour grapes, they said. Yet, after
the crushing Oval Test victory that set up the D’Oliveira series win, Graeme
Smith could scarcely have been more candid: “we owe a lot to hash”. He then
skipped off to fashion a makeshift bong from a Gatorade bottle. Conclusive and
damning evidence, no?

Amla, meanwhile, went of for some throwdowns. He was
reported to have lent his prayer mat to Alistair Cook.

“the sun always
shines on TB” (A-ha!)

After some deliberation while he located the correct shelves
in His omniscience, God, a.k.a. the Supreme Being (sometimes referred to as
Allah or Yahweh), has given his final verdict in the great debate taking hold
of Midlanders East and West – i.e. which city is the better: Birmingham
or Nottingham? – and he has done it through
the medium of weather.

The game here was played out under pale blue skies (prior to
the floodlit part, smartass), as had been the T20 game against the West Indies
and the four days of the Wisden Trophy Test. Down the road in Brummidge, things
haven’t gone quite so swimmingly (well, you know what I mean). Three out of
five days of their Windies Test were washed out, as was the Cashraker ODI
against Australia
in July.

Conclusive.

Woak-o Oh-Yes!

With England
missing the ambivalent hipsterism of Stuart Broad – “I’ll give the Barnet and
clobber a whirl, but I don’t want to commit to all the sh*t on my arm” – it was
good to see a frontline seamer of real batting ability at number 8 (a pet topic
of someone of this
parish).

“He could be whatever he wants to be,” pundits are wont to
say of young cricketers of promise. Well, given that young people want to be
things like dragons and drones and drills, it is doubtful whether one should adhere
to that notion. Even so, his naked batting talent, the excellent positions he
gets into, the instinctive movement of his hands, the range of strokes, all augur
well for England’s search for Test-class all-rounders: here may be a fourth
seamer eventually capable of batting as high as number 6.

* NB. We have made it five in
honour of England
short-changing the crowd to the tune of 29 balls, thus allowing SA to knock off
with 93 balls to spare. Please take it up with the ECB.